How to Mass Monetize Your YouTube Channel

One of the joys of the Internet is the opportunity to become friends with a complete stranger on the other side of the world. Michael Strange and I had two things in common when we first met: we both owned Ragdoll cats, and we both had YouTube channels.

After an exchange of comments on each other’s videos, I discovered Michael knew a lot more than I did about being found on YouTube and being paid for being found. I was making approximately $3 per month from my YouTube channel and Michael showed me the potential to make 3500% more than that!

If you have a YouTube channel, you may not know that you can make money from your videos (if they are yours) through revenue sharing.

You used to have to be a YouTube Partner in order to be able to monetize your videos, however, this is no longer the case. All you need now is a YouTube account that has videos on it and an Adsense account.

If you sign into your account and go to Video Manager, more than likely you’ll see a notification letting you know that you can now monetize your videos. So if you don’t have an Adsense account set up, you will want to do that.

Then, you’ll need to follow these steps to connect the two, and monetize your videos.

Setting ad preferences

Log into YouTube, go to Video Manager, and you’ll see a dollar sign that may or may not be colored in. For videos that are not yet monetized, the dollar sign is not colored in. For videos that are monetized, the dollar sign is colored green.

Those already monetized, of course, can be skipped. The ones with a dollar sign button on a white background are the ones to select and update.

As of April 2012, YouTube made mass monetizing your videos easier than before. If you go to Settings, you’ll see they’ve added a new entry in the left-hand column, near Monetization, called Ad Defaults. Select all the ones you want (partner accounts will have three options; non-partners just two) and click on Save.

You can apply these preferences to all new uploads, but they won’t affect movies you’ve already monetized.

Mass monetize your movies

To mass monetize your videos, select ten movies at a time and use the Action drop-down to bulk monetize them using the default preferences you have just saved. If you go through all your movies you can update the ad types in bulk like this.

If you’ve already set those preferences for a movie, then setting it again will make no difference. If a video only had some of the new preferences set, they will be updated to the full range of options when you have selected them and applied your new preferences.

To mass monetize after you have set your monetization preferences, go to Video Manager, where you’ll see your uploaded videos listed. Select the videos that you want to monetize, as below, then go to Actions and select Monetize.

A new window will pop up to confirm your preferences. Click on the blue Monetize button, and voila! All of those videos are monetized to your preferences!

You’ll also see a confirmation that the videos previously selected have been monetized.

If you have not monetized your videos, if you have only monetized some of them, or even if you just don’t remember, I encourage you to go into your YouTube account and check everything out.

Update your preferences and more likely than not, in a few weeks time you will see your YouTube revenues climb. Thanks to Michael’s advice, I have had fantastic results from this tip, which has even given me a little debt relief!

What are some of the monetizing tips that work for you on YouTube? Share them with us in the comments.

Not necessarily – it all depends on the subject matter, the ads available for display, etc. Michael has told me that around Christmas all revenue goes up because advertisers pay more for their ads to show….

Thanks for the tips, I’ve not monetizing my youtube channel yet as so far my viewership is negligible. Just like to ask whether there are any other ad networks that we can incorporate in our youtube video instead of Adsense?

This is amazing site Jenny. I just love YouTube and finding such an interesting information from your site was quite a great inspiring thing I can’t wait thanking you for. You really has helped me out, look forward to your next shout out!

Great tutorial. I started monetizing my YouTube videos months ago and I earn more on YouTube than I do from my blog. It’s important to note that the videos will play on your channel anyway so you might as well get your piece of the action.

Lots of fun and like others said, time-consuming. I love making videos and found that choosing public domain and “attribution” only music and images might hold up the approval to monetize even if I have all the credits rolling at the end. Anyone know if it helps to add credits to the description too? I might start doing that as well. I love adding music to my videos and me playing the spoons in every one might get old : )

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i also have activated windows 7,
i have tutorials on it, for some videos google has approved some of them and others are under review.
it says to give me the proof.
also i have some vim tutorials,
Can i upload windows , vim, ubuntu videos???